The field of crowd animation has recently been in the spotlight due to the development of computer graphics technology and graphics hardware. Further, in a variety of fields such as computer games, TV programs and movies, general users are often encountering crowd animations in which multiple characters move and interact with each other.
Crowd animation has been researched in various directions over the past few decades. Among those, researches have been made mainly based on agent models to control a crowd of characters, animals or the like using behavioral models and scripted behaviors. Further, researches have also been made on data-driven crowd simulation based on actual data of the real world.
Particularly in prior arts, in order to make a change to a crowd animation, a user is required to personally adjust a variety of complicated attribute values and limit values or collect the attribute and limit values in a data-driven manner, which is a difficult and time-consuming task even for an expert in producing crowd animations. Further, it takes some time until the user may check the result of adjusting the attribute and limit values after the adjustment, and the procedure for the adjustment is not intuitive. Thus, the user needs to inconveniently repeat the adjustment procedure several times in order to obtain a desired result for the crowd animation.
Notwithstanding, there are insufficient user interfaces and systems to allow general users including beginners to easily produce (i.e., generate) crowd animations. Further, since a formation of a crowd is a vitally important element in the field of crowd animation, there is a need for a technique to allow a user to configure and change the formation of a crowd animation in real time using a graphical user interface.